Despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision finding that race-based admissions standards violated the Civil Rights Act, higher education institutions across the country have continued racist practices with creative workarounds to maintain the existing racial quotas. The Department of Justice completed an investigation of the University of California, Los Angeles’s medical school this week, finding that it is still discriminating based on race. The department’s report is a stark reminder of how deeply racist ideology has infected higher education, and medical schools in particular, and why vigilance is needed in dismantling such odious practices.
As late as 2014, white men made up about 30% of medical students, a proportion largely in line with their share of the general population. Starting in the early 2010s, however, the body in charge of accrediting medical schools, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, adopted new regulations requiring schools “to achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes among its students” if they wanted to maintain their accreditation.
As a direct result of these new regulations, the average MCAT score of white applicants accepted to medical school rose to 512 (the MCAT is the standardized test college students take to demonstrate competency for medical school), while the average score of admitted black and Latino applicants fell to 506. Accordingly, the percentage of medical students who are white men fell to 20%.
If the MCAT were a worthless sorting mechanism, arguably, there would be no harm in ignoring it. But a wide body of research shows that MCAT scores do predict medical school success. This meant that to keep admitting lower-performing medical students, schools lowered their academic standards. And that is what a 2024 report on UCLA’s medical school found. At the end of each clinical rotation, medical students must take standardized clinical exams to show they have mastered the material. Nationally, just 5% of medical students failed these tests. At UCLA, it was 50%.
“I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” one whistleblower said. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”
Proponents of race-based medical admissions argued that these measures were needed to ensure equal access to high-quality medical care for minority patients. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson even cited a 2020 paper purporting to show that, “For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.” But not only did Jackson misread the study, it showed only a 13% difference in outcomes for high-risk black newborns treated by black doctors. A later Harvard study found that the original paper failed to account for higher percentages of low-birth-weight infants among black births. Once birth weight was controlled for, the alleged racial disparity completely disappeared.
Despite these new findings, the Department of Justice’s investigation found that UCLA’s medical school administrators still used unfounded claims that the “diversity” of the healthcare workforce improved health outcomes for black and Latino patients. The investigation further found that even after the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision, UCLA medical school administrators employed “intimidation and shaming tactics to pressure” admissions staff to use race unlawfully in admissions decisions.
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The Liaison Committee on Medical Education has since rescinded some of its diversity requirements and suspended others. But these moves came only after President Donald Trump signed an executive order threatening to revoke accreditors’ accreditation if they continued to require diversity mandates in their regulations. A Democratic White House could easily reverse those policies, removing both the Department of Education and the Justice Department as enforcement mechanisms for the Supreme Court’s race-based admissions ban.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon deserves praise for her dogged determination to ensure that medical schools follow the law by not discriminating on the basis of race. But as UCLA’s continued practice of race-based admissions shows, a return to blatant racism in the medical profession is just one election away.